back in 2004 java5 went GA and introduced static imports among several other syntactic niceties.

this feature is most useful for static helper methods – instead of writing Assert.assertEquals, i would rather use assertEquals, since i know i am writing a test, and in the domain of testing, assertEquals does not need to be qualified. same goes for many internal utility methods that i tend to use a lot (e.g. asList()) or static factory methods (e.g. newDateTime()). as a side note, using newXY() as a static factory method as opposed to create() makes it more suitable for static importing.

in my current IDE (Eclipse) i rely on auto-completion Ctrl+1 programming, so i would start typing Assert., followed by Ctrl+Space and then manually convert normal import to import static. it was very undignified.

it turns out that in Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+M that i already used to import dependencies under the cursor, also works for converting static method calls into static imports.

now all i have to do is type Assert.assertEquals once, then press Ctrl+Shift+M (obsessively followed by Ctrl+Shift+O to organize imports), and i can start using assertEquals all over the place without qualifying it with Assert.

as an additional convenience, i always set Number of static imports needed for .* to 1 under Java -> Code Style -> Organize Imports in Eclipse preferences. this way a single static import of a method from Assert triggers import static of Assert.*, which is what i want.